The Nurture Revolution: Grow Your Baby's Brain and Transform Their Mental Health through the Art of Nurtured Parenting

by Greer Kirshenbaum

I was confident that the nurture I provided in infancy would not only mitigate all of the effects of a stressful pregnancy, birth, prematurity, and NICU stay, but also grow an incredibly resilient brain for both my baby and myself. I knew that by providing high nurture, I would be bathing my baby’s brain in nurturing hormones and neurotransmitters like oxytocin, dopamine, and endorphins, and as a result his brain would have extremely high neuroplasticity and a very low risk of poor outcomes. I knew that high nurture would also be an opportunity for me to change my brain toward better mental health.

When babies receive nurturing care in the first three years of life, it builds strong, resilient brains—brains that are less susceptible to poor mental health for life.

It goes against our gut feelings and instincts not to nurture our babies,

Responding to infants respectfully and reliably physically builds a strong brain, mind, and body on many measurable levels.

Memories from infancy are stored in the brain as implicit memory, which makes up the emotional brain, the unconscious mind, and the foundation for lifelong mental and physical health.

When infants grow up with reliably nurturing caregivers, their brains are bathed in what I call a nurture bath—the infant brain releases a cocktail of hormones and neurotransmitters beginning with oxytocin and followed by a cascade of dopamine, serotonin, endorphins, and GABA—which helps them develop resilient emotional brain circuitry.

Resilient emotional brains also create healthy states of safety in our body. This manifests as a relaxed heartbeat, relaxed muscles, low inflammation, healthy blood flow to our vital organs, regulated digestive and immune systems, slower aging of the body’s cells or telomeres, and high-quality restorative sleep. This safety state protects the body from illnesses like heart disease, cancer, and diabetes, as well as digestive problems and neurological disorders. Simultaneously, this safety state powerfully provides protection from anxiety and depression.

At the heart of all nurture is the intention to be present, attuned, and close. To be a source of calm. To say, with your presence, “I’m here. I see you. You are important to me. You’re safe.”

a sizable amount of memory from infancy is stored in the brain as implicit memory, and this makes up the unconscious mind.

So when you feel challenged by nurture, this is why: You are doing something profound. You are doing tremendous work building a brain, the most complex thing in existence besides perhaps the universe. You are building countless brain cells and receptors in your baby’s brain with your brain. This is intense, deep work and something to truly be proud of and celebrate.

Wanting to be close and held is what your baby’s survival biology needs in order to be regulated. Separation from caregivers is a threat to a baby’s survival and activates their brain circuitry to cry or cling.

Your baby’s survival circuits tell you, “Hold me, look into my eyes, talk to me, keep me close, regulate my stress, help me with my emotions, help me with sleep, and I will explore and come back to you when I need you.”

Unconditional access to an external emotional brain is a necessary and integral part of a baby’s biology until they grow their own. The circuitry of their emotional brain just begins to mature around three years old, but it is still quite immature, and it strengthens more and more over time.

Nurture is trusting the communication from our baby’s survival and emotional brain circuits and trusting our abilities to regulate our children.

When a baby can’t engage a caregiver in communication or get help to lower their stress or manage emotions or have help with sleep, it is excruciating and intolerable.

Let’s clear this up directly: Paying attention to your infant’s communication and cries does not spoil them or make them dependent. Here we unlearn myth 2. Replace it with the knowledge that responding reliably strengthens a baby’s emotional brain circuits, helps them grow confidently independent, and gives them the gift of stress regulation for life.

Nurtured resilient emotional brain circuits will support a powerful thinking brain and create a regulated brain.

babies do not have a brake pedal in their stress system. Their hippocampus and prefrontal cortex are developing and are not able to stop stress.19

When they are nurtured, an oxytocin cascade releases and acts on the infant’s stress system to stop stress and simultaneously build the system toward resilience.

You can unlearn myth 3, Babies can and need to learn to self-soothe, which means go from a state of high stress to a state of safety on their own. Replace it with: Babies cannot self-soothe because they do not have the brain parts to do so until way beyond infancy.

Nurture in infancy leads to changes in the amygdala, hypothalamus, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex to create an adaptive alarm signal and strong brake pedal for the stress system so that stress states are brief and efficient.22

when we nurture our babies, we influence their DNA. We influence the DNA that builds a baby’s brain cells, proteins, and brain circuits to create mental wellness.

Adverse infant experiences are proposed to include a lack of: carrying, physical contact, breastfeeding or feeding with contact, presence of caregivers, co-sleeping, co-regulation, and mirroring emotions.10 These experiences may leave epigenetic markers on DNA to increase susceptibility to mental unwellness.

A baby inherits both their maternal grandmother’s and their mother’s emotional experiences via epigenetics.

In the first three months of infancy, oxytocin increases in fathers, testosterone lowers, and brain structures change.

Your new brain circuits and abilities include sensitivity to your baby’s communication, enhanced empathy to understand and respond to your baby’s emotions with nurture, enhanced threat detection skills to keep your baby safe, and motivating, calming, and rewarding feelings by interacting with your baby.17

The more you listen to your intuition, the louder you will hear it and the easier it will be to nurture and parent. Whenever you have feelings to respond as much as possible to your baby’s communication, feel deep empathy for your baby, want to hold your baby all day or protect your baby—lean in. This is your parenting intuition. It brings you calm and reward. You can never respond too much, feel too much empathy, hold your baby too much, or be too protective. These experiences are exactly what your brain has been changed to do.

Parent brain changes are well supported by therapy, medication when needed, social support, relationships, and communicating the experiences of early parenting. Remember that it’s a time of neuroplasticity unlike any since adolescence, and this means that you’re actually in great condition to be receptive

The reality is that becoming a parent is the birth of a baby and the birth of a parent.

The practice of nurturing presence is a shift in mindset from thinking of babies as objects to be managed to thinking of them as human beings who exist in relationships.

1. Do you see me? 2. Do you care that I’m here? 3. Am I enough for you, or do you need me to be better in some way? 4. Can I tell that I’m special to you by the way that you look at me? As parents, we have a nurturing presence when our baby knows that the answer to all of these questions is a resounding YES.

If you can practice bringing your attention back to being present with your baby, you exercise your adult mind to be more emotionally intelligent, better at self-regulating, more empathetic, and you strengthen those parts of your brain undergoing neuroplasticity as you become a parent.

Babies don’t behave the way they do in order to manipulate or give others a hard time. Rather, their behaviors express stress, emotions, or needs, including developmentally appropriate needs like testing boundaries or asking for attention. They are having a hard time. When we cultivate nurtured empathy—the ability to connect with another person’s internal world—we can go to the root of the behavior to name the emotion, which we can regulate; and the need, which is where we can help.

Show curiosity about the feeling or need beneath the behavior and focus on connection—bringing your baby in close to help you both figure out how to meet a need or feel and release an emotion. If the behavior needs to be changed, guiding behavior once the baby is calm will help them choose different behaviors when they feel similar emotions

when babies are fed skin-to-skin on a parent or caregiver’s body with a nurtured presence, they receive all of the senses that grow their brains to be resilient—taste, touch, the smell of a caregiver, eye contact, and gentle movement from being in your arms. Babies and parents show beautiful brain-building synchrony when babies are breast, body, or bottle fed with closeness, eye contact, and sensitivity.

In animal models, pups who receive the most touch—the most licking, grooming, nursing, and cuddling from their mothers—grow the most resilience in every part of the stress brain. In human studies, the same results have been found in babies who receive more touch and closeness. These babies grow stress systems and emotional systems wired for lifelong health and wellness. Combined with touch, movement, like walking or singing and dancing gently while carrying your baby, induces a calming circuit in the infant brain.21

Your chest is a one-of-a-kind special home for your baby. Both babies and parents have special nerves in their chest called CT-afferent nerves. These sensitive nerves respond only to pleasurable touch and release oxytocin and dopamine into the baby and parent brains, which puts both baby and parents into nurtured safety states.

When newborns are home, most are swaddled constantly, with a pacifier, sound machine, and lots of time in a movement machine or a bassinet, swing, or stroller. These are not nurturing practices. It is not respectful to the baby’s or parents’ brains. In this way neither baby nor parent is getting a nurture bath.

Being close to a caregiver and being touched regulates all of the survival brain functions; it boosts physical health; stabilizes heart rate, breathing, blood glucose, blood oxygen, body temperature; builds the immune system; improves sleep; promotes breastfeeding or chestfeeding success and weight gain; decreases pain perception; decreases crying episodes and duration; and activates infant speech motor areas and imitation of sounds. It boosts mental health by lowering stress and anxiety for the baby and parent(s), enriches infant-parent interactions, increases baby smiling, promotes bonding, increases parent confidence, and has effects twenty years later.

More responsiveness to stress leads to a resilient stress system, which supports social development, secure attachment, language development, cognitive development, fewer behavioral issues, less aggression, and more parent confidence and less parent anxiety.

Whether they come back to you on their own or they signal that they need you to come to them, when that stress curve rises, you are what we call their “safe haven”—your role is to comfort, regulate, and organize their feelings—in other words, lend your baby your mature brain. When we do so our babies go out and explore again feeling regulated and curious.

In my experience, powerful co-regulation is an underrated benefit of breastfeeding or body feeding for all of infancy. Nursing gives babies an incredibly pleasant feeling, like an internal massage. Milk is calming and rewarding and quickly releases oxytocin and dopamine in both baby and parent.

As you work to learn your baby’s stress states and safety states, keep these words in your mind: “Can I be more flexible right now?”

Throughout the night, as you soothe your baby back to sleep when they wake, you’re using your safety state—including neurotransmitters like oxytocin—to bring your baby back into a safety state so they can go back to sleep. Nighttime nurture builds the stress system to be resilient and shapes how infants respond to stress after infancy, specifically by lowering cortisol responses following a stressor and faster cortisol recovery.4

Parents also benefit from the safety signal of their infant by having restorative sleep, lower stress, lower anxiety, and higher oxytocin.5 When you are close to your baby, your parent brain sleeps differently than when you are separated from your baby. Sleeping close further matures your developing parent brain to help you be more nurturing in your waking life.6

Research does show that sleep training infants, for the subset of babies that stop signaling, is beneficial for parents to get more uninterrupted sleep at night.7 Unfortunately, this leaves out a very important person: the baby.

In reality, sleep training is not neuroscience-supported or evidence-based. It’s not trauma informed, it’s not nervous system informed, and it’s not mental health informed. It is based on absolutely no evidence of efficacy or safety for the infant brain. It is simply practice-based, meaning it is done because others have done it before. It’s not even particularly effective: One study of over two hundred infants found that sleep training only stopped nighttime signaling completely in 14 percent of babies who were sleep trained at home.8 Many parents find (and sleep training admits this) that they have to “retrain” their infants multiple times, after illness, teething, travel, or any other event in which an infant gets support to feel safe and relaxed throughout the night. Babies are not learning to sleep; they are learning to stop signaling, and their need for co-regulation is so strong that they signal again if their parents respond again. It’s also a totally unregulated and quite lucrative field.

In other words, while some babies are indeed quiet in their cribs after they’re sleep trained, we know that nothing has actually changed in their development, so those babies are still waking, and still in stress, but they know that no one is coming to co-regulate them, so they stop bothering to signal for help. This process uses babies’ innate survival mechanism to shut down if no one is around to help. Instead of entering sleep through a safety state, they enter through a fearful stress state. Sleep training puts the infant brain at risk of experiencing high and/or prolonged periods of toxic stress. It puts the infant brain at risk of developing a highly reactive amygdala and hypothalamus, with a diminished ability to regulate stress via lower stop signals in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex. There is likely a spectrum of how babies are affected by this experience. It’s not a deterministic risk, as genetics and experience certainly contribute—genetics might be protective for some babies and increase vulnerability for other babies. Sadly, it’s often vulnerable, highly reactive babies who need the most co-regulation—and thus wake the most at night—who are likely to be sleep trained.

It is more challenging to have a baby on the lower end of these sleep needs, and you will need more support.

In the United States, doctors typically receive twenty-seven minutes of infant sleep education in medical school, and in Canada less than 1 percent of doctors receive any training on infant sleep in medical school.27 In Australia, health professionals scored less than 50 percent correct on a test about infant sleep.28 So unless your doctor or medical professional has taken a specific training in biologically normal infant sleep and is supportive of nurturing infant sleep, do not rely on them to help.